Dream Land Read Online Free Page A

don’t know whether in the end it turned into a ghost. Just a ghost.”

4

WHERE IS OUR VILLAGE?
    S afi scrambled from the car, staring in disbelief. Bedraggled ducks floated on an opaque pea-green pond. A dirt road led up the narrow valley, past two tents and a half-ruined building of spongy-looking yellow blocks. The woods cloaking the mountainous slopes of Mangup-Kalye closed them in with silence and with noise. The noise was the racketing birds, and the silence was what they couldn’t fill with their singing: a huge, echoing void. Birdsong and silence that had not known people for a long, long time.
    “Where is it? Where’s Adym-Chokrak? Where is our village?”
    Safi sat down on the grass with a bump, she was so disappointed. Even after the shock of the camp in Bakhchisaray, she’d still thought the village would be exactly as Grandpa had described it. She knew it off by heart, although she’d never been there. The two-storey house where Uncle Murat and Aunt Halide lived, the
chaykhana
under the walnut tree, and the headman Ali Memetov’s place smothered in grapevines, where they made wine even though the Koran said they weren’t allowed to drink it. The fat-tailed sheep, the cobbled alleys that led to the fountain, the tobacco leaves laid out to dry in the sunshine.
    All of it had gone. Every last scrap and stone.
    Behind her, there was a splosh and an indignant quacking from the ducks; Lutfi had heaved a lump of mud into the soupy pond and was staring at the widening ripples. Papa squeezed Mama’s hand where they stood by the car. And Grandpa blinked at the empty echoing valley and said, “Well, we’ve got some rebuilding to do.”
    Mehmed and Papa had already made a start. The yellow block building was half finished, not half ruined, and it was the house where Safi’s family was going to live.
    It was small and square, built of blocks of crushed shell that looked crumbly as sugar, but when Safi touched them they were hard and sharp-edged. Most of the house so far was underground: a cellar for their container of belongings when it arrived from Uzbekistan. Over it, raw splintery planks had been laid to make a floor. The walls stood just a little taller than Safi. A single small window was finished but it had no glass, just thin boards. A sheet of plastic was stretched over the top of the walls. When Safi peered inside, it was darkly poky and smelt of damp cement; three forlorn iron bedsteads, a dusty stool, a jumble of tin cups and plates.
    “This is our house?” There could only be three rooms in there. No bathroom, no bedrooms.
    The mixture of rage and disappointment must have shown in her face, because Grandpa said in his slow deep voice, “When we arrived in the Hungry Steppe we lived in dugouts. In holes in the ground. That was all that was waiting for us, Safinar.”
    “Yes, I
know!
You’ve told us a million times.” Safi was shocked. She clapped her hand over her mouth and looked round to see if anyone else had heard how disrespectful she had just been. She’d never talked to her grandfather in that tone before. She wasn’t sure she’d ever even
wanted
to. But something about the sight of the gloomy rubbishy half-built hovel made her stomach twist. She knew Grandpa had lived in a dugout. She knew the Tatars had been forced to build their own work camps in exile. She knew they’d had malaria and lice and only the clothes they stood up in. But she couldn’t care about that, when all she could think of was
her
house, the one they’d left behind to come here.
    “And I’ve told you a thousand times about this village we had to leave in Crimea,” Grandpa said sternly. “It’s gone now, but it’s still in our blood, our bones.”
    Safi turned away so that he wouldn’t see how angry she was. She had lived in a proper house in Samarkand, with six rooms and a veranda. The sun shone in warm squares through the clean curtains; the coffee pot and cups gleamed on the shelf. In her neat cosy